AWS Delivers on Latest Graviton3 Price/Performance Promise
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has expanded the number of virtual machines based on the latest generation of its Graviton processors with instances that support DDR-5 memory.
The latest Amazon EC2 instance types called M7g and R7g that are now generally available are based on the AWS Graviton3 processors, which were developed using an architecture created by Arm. Previously, these instances were only available as part of a technology preview program.
Rahul Kulkarni, director of product management at AWS, said these latest offerings leverage DDR-5 memory to provide 25% better performance than the previous sixth generation Graviton instances. DDR5 memory increases available bandwidth by 50%, he noted.
Graviton processors now offer the lowest-priced virtual machine instance in addition to the best performance and price-performance ratio in the entire AWS portfolio, added Kulkarni.
AWS advocates the use of its AWS Graviton processors for general purpose workloads as more IT teams are tasked with reducing costs as the overall number of applications deployed in the cloud continues to grow. In fact, all of the top Fortune 50 companies have deployed workloads on Graviton processors, Kulkarni noted.
Although it is not clear how many applications are being developed to run natively on Arm processors, for most applications the process of refactoring existing applications to run on Arm processors is not as intensive as it used to be for single-class processor applications have been moved to another.
Additionally, Kulkarni noted that AWS is committed to providing a full suite of DevOps services, including a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform, to ease the transition to Graviton processors.
There are, of course, multiple strategies to contain cloud costs, ranging from committing to annual consumption of a certain amount of compute resources at discounted rates to more reliance on Spot instances that are available for a limited time. Regardless of the approach, the days when developers could call on cloud resources at will seem to be over as enterprise IT organizations become more aware of the total cost of IT. As a result, many of them are adopting financial operations (FinOps) best practices to maximize the use of cloud infrastructure resources.
Like most cloud service providers, AWS offers businesses a wide range of processor options. However, it is evident that AWS considers ARM processors in the form of Graviton to be the most efficient from both a price and performance perspective. It’s not clear how quickly companies will adopt Graviton in the cloud given the dominance of x86-based platforms, but it’s evident that there’s now a clear alternative for general-purpose workloads. As these workloads become more data intensive, interest in more efficient processor architectures increases.
Of course, x86 platforms aren’t going away anytime soon. But as more ARM-based processors find their way into enterprises, DevOps workflows become more difficult to manage.